An agile and diminutive point guard at 5 ft 8 in tall, he attended Moorpark community college for two years before transferring to a Division I program, New Mexico State.
[4] Crawford entered the starting five at Westchester in his freshman year, after a particularly good performance against Crenshaw, one of the top high school basketball teams in the area.
[3] He was recruited by Texas Tech and New Mexico State, but he was struggling with grades at Westchester[2] and stopped attending classes after the end of the basketball season.
[2] Crawford immediately found success at Moorpark, and was the best player of the team, scoring 20.7 points per game and averaging 12.1 assists (411 total) in his freshman season.
[7] His performances at Moorpark caught the attention of Gar Forman, assistant coach at New Mexico State, who called Crawford and asked him to join the Aggies for the 1991–92 season.
[13] At the end of the season he won the Frances Pomeroy Naismith Award for best player under 6 ft in college basketball, and he was named an All-American Honorable Mention by Associated Press.
[13] Source[14] [6] In the days leading to the 1993 NBA draft Crawford was projected as a late second round pick,[8][15] and he took part in Pre-Draft camps in Phoenix, Arizona.